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There is a lot of action on the technology front to create ways to ingest, process and analyze real time data. The theory behind this is that fresher data has more value. If you can get an answer in real time is better than having to wait.

But, while this is true in many cases, it is clear that there are parts of a business where getting the answers is just not that urgent, mostly because the data doesn’t change that fast. Do we need a real time org chart? No, but knowing when the org chart changes is useful. Do we need real time expense report? No, but being able to act quickly to before a large expense is made can be really useful.

The question I would like to answer is this: How can we best focus our efforts on real timing our businesses to get the maximum impact?

This is a big topic that should generate plenty of articles, but I started my search for answers by looking at the world of AdTech, which is has a massive incentive to provide real time data about performance of ad campaigns, and by talking to Michael O’Connell, the Chief Analytics Officer of TIBCO, which is betting a large part of its farm on creating a state of the art architecture for real timing business processes.

The Fundamental Pattern for Real Timing Your Business

In the world of AdTech, there are a maze of companies that all participate in the most complex and fast-moving data supply chain in the world. The ad exchanges at the center collect under one umbrella large collections of services and data for both publishers and buyers of ads. The volume of data flowing through ad exchanges and the speed at which auctions to place adds on various sites is unbelievable. For example, AppNexus, the second largest ad exchange in terms of gross revenue behind Google according to Cowen and Company, processes 45 billion ad buys in a single day at peak loads.

Ad exchanges provide reports about the performance of adds as fast as they can through a data pipeline that tracks where ads were served, when they were clicked, and, as much as possible, by what type of person. While ad exchanges do track the kind of person you are, some ad exchanges like AppNexus are super careful not to track personally identifiable information (PII). The real timing efforts of ad exchanges is to make as much information about the performance of ad campaigns real time. By doing this, it is possible to make adjustments faster and optimize the performance of your ad spend by shifting money away from what isn’t working toward what is.

This pattern, speeding up an existing data pipeline, describes most efforts at real timing. In the AdTech world real timing is a no brainer.